WeeChat (also known as Wee Enhanced Environment for Chat) is an open source, extensible, cross-platform, fast, modular and lightweight chat client specifically designed for the IRC (Internet Relay Chat) protocol.

It’s extendable through plugins

Key features include a modular and lightweight core with support for additional plugins, multi-protocol architecture, support for multiple languages, support for UTF-8 character encodings, support for multi-servers connections, as well as support for DCC (Direct Client-to-Client) chats and file transfers.

It’s fully compliant with several RFCs

It can be easily extended with the C, Tcl, Ruby, Scheme, Python, Lua or Perl programming languages, and fully compliant with RFCs 1459, 2810, 2811, 2812 and 2813. Complete and comprehensive documentation is available on the project’s website.

It’s customizable and extensible through scripts

In WeeChat, everything can be done with the keyboard. It is customizable and extensible through scripts. The application comes with many GUI (Graphical User Interfaces) front-ends, available in GTK, Qt and Ncurses.

Supports a wide-range of platforms

This is a multi-platform program written from scratch in the C programming language and designed to support a wide-range of platforms, including GNU/Linux, BSD (FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD), GNU Hurd, Mac OS X and Windows (Cygwin).

Availability and supported architectures

On GNU/Linux, the WeeChat application can be downloaded as source archives, as well as binary packages for the Ubuntu Linux operating system, supporting both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. It can be easily installed on any Linux distribution from the default software repositories.

WeeChat was reviewed by Marius Nestor, last updated on September 28th, 2014